HP Pavilion M8300F Desktop PC Product Review

Desktop PC's are selling better than most high priced products this time of year considering the current state of the US economy. With school starting a few months away many parents are picking up these big ticket items as they prepare to ship their kids off to college. The HP pavilion is a product line that is selling just as good as anyone so I've decided to get my hands on one of the more popular models in the HP Pavilion M8300F. I've had a chance to spend some time with it now and I'm going to give it a brief review. First we'll get started by taking a look at a few of the essentials.

Hardware:

TV tuner (NTSC/ATSC), personal video recording functionality, and programming guide

Processor: a 3.0 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ dual-core

Storage Space: (2) 320 GB hard drives (maintaining a total of 640GB of space)

RAM: 3GB of RAM (which can be upgraded to an 8 GB maximum)

Optical Drive: A CD R/RW with an integrated 16x LightScribe DVD +/- burner

Graphics Card: an Nvidia GeForce 6150 SE (utilizing up to 1343MB of total available memory both shared and dedicated)

Expandability: open bay for optional HP proprietary external hard drive

This media center style desktop has a ton of storage space thanks to the dual hard drives. This is perfect for the movie and music buffs out there. Also a great addition is the television tuner. This allows for the desktop to become a DVR thanks to some software that comes included on Windows Vista. The graphics card isn't anything to stick your nose up at either. I was able to enjoy playing some of my favorite games and most consumers will be hard pressed to find something in the near future that this desktop will fail to operate. In the end I would rate this desktop's performance very high.

Connectivity:

6 2.0 USB ports (which are used to connect a wide range of peripherals ranging from digital cameras, to iPods to printers)

2 FireWire ports (these are typically used for high speed data transfer between digital camcroders as well as some compatible PCs)

1 Composite video input

1 S-Video input

1 VGA output (this is a typical monitor connection)

1 audio output / 1 microphone input

Digital SPDIF digital audio input and output supported

2 PS/2 ports (which are old input device ports used with mice and keyboards)

15 in 1 media card reader (this allows the user to directly insert the memory from mobile devices into the PC)

1 Ethernet port (so that this desktop can connect to a wired network)

1 56K modem port (to be used for dialing up an internet connection)

This desktop is going to please the vast majority of consumer's needs from the high end gamer right down to the family. Priced online at most retailers around $900 this desktop is a decent deal. As August arrives and we begin to see an increase in sales we might see a bit of a price reduction however I wouldn't expect too much. If you need a desktop and need it now, this is an excellent buy.